Year: 2011

A few months ago I posted on how to automate deployment of Windows Azure projects using MSBuild. While the approach documented in that post continues to work, Windows Azure SDK 1.6 has introduced some new capabilities for managing Windows Azure credentials and publishing settings which I wanted to leverage and build upon. With this new…

Just a quick note that I’ve edited my previous post Using MSBuild to deploy to multiple Windows Azure environments based on some changes to the platform that have come with the Windows Azure SDK 1.5 and Windows Azure PowerShell cmdlets 2.0. The main changes are to the MSBuild targets added to the .ccproj file: The…

Introduction In my last post, I showed how to use Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus Queues with WCF. Service Bus Queues provide a great mechanism for asynchronous communication between between two specific applications or services. However in complex systems it’s often useful to support this kind of messaging between many applications and services. This is…

In 2008 I posted a series of blog articles about how to use MSMQ, WCF and IIS together. I chose to use this architecture as it combined the scalability and resiliency benefits of durable asynchronous messaging, with the simplicity and power of the WCF programming model and IIS hosting model. Over the last year I’ve…

What is an Environment? Anyone who has worked on a software development project will be familiar with the concept of an “environment”. Simply put, an environment is a set of infrastructure that you can deploy your application to, supporting a specific activity in your software development lifecycle. Any significant project will have multiple environments, generally…

Many developers choose to use service oriented techniques to break large systems into smaller, loosely coupled services. Frequently, each service will be hosted on a different machine and use WS-* protocols for standards-based communication. However there can be times when different hosting and communication approaches make more sense. For example, if you control a service…

Bubble Charts are a great way to visualise data that has three numerical values for each point. Two of the values are plotted on the X and Y axis, while the other is represented via the diameter of the bubble. Excel also supports Bubble Charts with more than one data series – this is useful…

Update 6 December 2011: Windows Azure SDK 1.6 includes some significant changes to how credentials and publishing settings are managed, so I’ve written a new post Automated Build and Deployment with Windows Azure SDK 1.6 which shows how to leverage these in a build and deployment process. Update 26 August 2011: The following post was written…